Meshing!

It's been a long time in the making but finally FancyRay is capable of rendering triangle meshes. As of right now, only .obj files are supported but it is my goal to extend this in the future to other formats as well (.max, .3ds, etc). Stay tuned for some cool new scenes!

In this image here, we have a blue matte bunny, a ruby dragon, marble floor, tiled walls, normal-mapped plaster ceiling all complete with global illumination and caustics.

And here is the same scene but with different materials

And here is the Venus de Milo :-)

Putting it all together - so far

Although there are still many features currently under development (spoilers -- These include tone mapping for HDR images, the ability to import 3D mesh files, amongst others) Here are some images that combine many of the features already available in FancyRay. These features include

Glass
Mirrored and glossy mirrored surfaces
Perlin Noise
Anisotropic Reflection / Metallic Surfaces
Spectral Rendering
Iridescence
Fluorescence
Texture Mapping
Normal Mapping
Matrix Transformations of camera and scene objects
Spheres, triangles, boxes, and plane primitives
Motion blur
Global Illumination
Caustics
Point, Area, Sphere and directional lights
Soft shadows
Lens Distortion (Wide Angle, Fish Eye, etc)
Depth of Field
Bokeh

See which of these effects you spot in the images below!

Normal + Texture Mapping Combo

In this image I've combined normal mapping with texture mapping (see earlier posts) to create objects in the scene that are very high quality. In this image we see many of FancyRay's other effects including depth of field, lens distortion, orb lights and soft shadows.

Normal Mapping

After a bit of a hiatus I have implemented normal mapping! Normal mapping is a technique used for faking the lighting of bumps, dents, etc without having to actually modify any actual geometry. A "normal map" texture is applied to an object where each pixel in the texture represents a perturbation of a normal. These are used to modify the normals on the object's surface and are used when shading calculations are performed.

Spectral Rendering Part II - UV Lighting and Fluorescence

My latest feature for FancyRay was the introduction of Fluorescent materials.  Fluorescent materials work by first absorbing the incoming frequencies of light at varying degrees based on its unique wavelength absorption function, and then modulates the absorbed frequencies by a predetermined mapping function from absorbed -> emitted. This mapping function, shifts the wavelengths towards higher values and modulates their intensities.

Scene rendered using normal daylight spectrum (CIE Standard Illuminant D65)

And here is the scene again rendered using a Black Light spectral power distribution

Aperture Shape and Bokeh

Up until now the default aperture shape has been a simple disk, however now the aperture shape can be directly changed by the user. Some examples of possible shapes include triangle, diamond, pentagon and other higher order polynomials.

The main effect of this is that out of focus highlights in the scene will take on the shape of the aperture. This effect is known as "bokeh."

Here are some images demonstrating the effect.

Here is a heavily out of focus image with a triangular aperture. Notice the highlights on the bubble and the ball in the background appear triangular.

And here is the same scene with a diamond shaped aperture

Filtering

This is a simple extension to FancyRay which allows the user to add in different filter types to the final image rendering. Here are some filters applied to a Cornell Box with two bubbles.

Original

     GrayScale

Sepia

Negative